Scorecard Best Practices

Hospitality Services Company²

Hospitality Services Company (HSC) connects people with the world's greatest travel and leisure possibilities by retailing travel products and providing distribution and technology solutions for the hospitality industry. HSC supports travelers, travel agents, corporations, and suppliers through its affiliated companies. The company is represented in many countries, with revenues in excess of $US1 billion.

In 2004, the hospitality industry faced challenges such as rapid incentive growth, and channel shift within the business,—including the emergence of direct to consumer models, consolidation, slowing online growth rates, and financial pressures driven by low‐cost providers. Additionally, well‐capitalized and new low‐cost competitors, as well as online and offline consolidation, were compounding the need for faster development times and content superiority.

Internally, HSC experienced a myriad of people and process issues: consumption of executive bandwidth on merger and acquisition opportunities and emerging businesses, looming key customer contract renewals, underperforming initiatives, international growth complexity, unrealized synergies across business units, frustration with performance incentive payouts, and lack of visibility into operating plans and results.

An examination of HSC's Total Shareholder Return during 2004 showed an organization that was trailing in the market as well as within the industry. HSC was perceived by many of its large ...